Legacy Match at Wimbledon

Few things shift quicker than legacies. Three years ago, Tiger Woods was the greatest golfer in history. Now he’s a very good golfer with a sex addiction. A month ago, LeBron James was a spectacularly talented player whose hubris, the thinking went, might prevent him from winning a championship, or at least as many as he thought. After four relatively easy victories, we can only wonder how many titles might he win. Is infinite a possibility? And, just last week, Roger Federer was over the hill, within a few points of being out of Wimbledon, his fans reduced to wishing ill upon opponents. Today we act like we knew his latest victory was coming all along.

Sunday did not begin well for Federer. He immediately fell down a break to Andy Murray, the homegrown favorite when he’s winning (he’s from Scotland), or, when he’s losing, the man Brits say is pouty, wilts in big moments, and looks, while playing, like a weasel with a bad hangnail. (They accuse him as such for a similar reason: he’s from Scotland, not England.) Federer lost that set, then, well, pick your adjective: this was vintage, classic, timeless, exquisite, sublime Roger Federer. Murray played his guts out, racing around the court, but no matter: he slipped once, then twice, then took his shoes off and slammed them on the ground. Federer ended up on his back, too, but intentionally so, and at the end of the match. He’d just won his seventh Wimbledon title and seventeenth Grand Slam.

So what do those numbers mean? Not much when they start to get this big, and, late in a career, when it comes to solidifying a legacy. What matters here are the numbers thirty—Federer’s age—and nine. That’s the number of majors Federer had played without winning one, over three calendar years, a drought of enough length and severity to build fears among even loyal fans that the man we’d dubbed the greatest ever had lost a step, or that—let’s lower things to a whisper now—perhaps his steps hadn’t been as nimble as Nadal’s or Djokovic’s to begin with. What this win had proved, along with the third-round win from down two sets, the fourth round win on a bad back, and especially the semifinal win over Djokovic, was exactly what our eyes had told us for the past three years, even if the results made it hard to believe: Federer was still there, a few bounces away, and, with all those gaudy numbers, still the sole member of the current troika with a claim to the sport’s highest throne. Murray, when asked if Federer had lost a step, made the point for us: “He could be sitting on twenty Grand Slams if one point or a couple of inches changed here or there.”

There was, of course, another legacy up for adjusting yesterday: that of the pouty, weasely Scotsman. In the past four years, Murray has been ranked no lower than No. 5 in the world, yet, winless in Grand Slams, he remains an outcast among the sport’s élite. On Sunday, his legacy was not quite cemented, but certainly elevated. He ended the match in a drizzle of tears that showed just how much he cared about the game, about his own legacy. “I’m getting closer,” he cracked, when the merciless Wimbledon m.c. handed this distraught, dishevelled twenty-five-year-old a microphone and made him give a speech. (Tennis is crueller to its losers than any other sport.) It was a reference to Murray’s struggles to break through against Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal, and to Britain’s struggles to break through against just about everyone. (The British drought at Wimbledon will now reach at least seventy-seven years.) The speech was enough to make even this Federite wonder, briefly, if he had been rooting for the wrong guy.

The postgame ceremony also made me think, for the first time, about what lay ahead for men’s tennis: what the legacy would be for a generation now solidified as the greatest in history. (Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal have now won twenty-nine of the past thirty majors.) It happened after Federer had won, and after his twin daughters, Charlene and Myla, nearly three years old, were plucked from who knows where to sit courtside for the celebration. They clapped when prompted by their mother. One of them, bored, took her hands and wiped them from brow to chin. Get on with it, Dad! It was the first time I’d seen the Federer brood in public—he hadn’t won a major since they were only months old—and suddenly a reason for their being out of sight suggested itself. If everyone already thinks you’re over the hill, best not to show them why you seem so tired during morning matches. But therein lies the truth: Federer is a father in his thirties. Nadal has shaky knees. Djokovic is good but not as indomitable as we thought, or feared. It now seems reasonable to figure that, within the next two years, the reign of the Big Three could be more aluminum than iron-fisted. But enough! Let’s enjoy it while we can. Each has now won a Grand Slam this year. Andy, you’ll have to wait until next year. We’re headed to Flushing for the tiebreaker.

Photograph by Anja Niedringhaus/AP.

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